An end of year note from Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis
22 December 2025
As we all head into the Christmas break, it’s time for me to continue a small tradition that I’ve grown fond of over the past four years: the Mayoral Minute.
For those who don’t know the backstory, the Mayoral Minute is an end of year note that Mayors of Cape Town wrote annually for over a century, before the tradition quietly fell away somewhere in the late 1970s. I have no idea why it stopped, perhaps because it was replaced by the dry and perfunctory “annual report”.
When I became mayor, I decided to bring it back. Partly because I thought it was a nice way to pause and reflect at the end of each year. But also because these reflections become a kind of informal historical record – not written by officials for archives, but by the mayor speaking plainly about the city we all share and love.
This is my fourth Mayoral Minute. As it’s only published annually, it is necessarily a bit of a longer one. Thank you for taking the time to read it. If you like it, please do me the favour of passing it on to others.
The first of these went out at the end of 2022 when we were still finding our feet after COVID had hit our city hard. We were still very much in “steady the ship” mode. Four years in, Cape Town is on an altogether improved trajectory, with much work still to do.
Depending on when the next local government election is held – it could be late 2026 or early 2027 – this may well be the last Mayoral Minute of this term of office. Although hopefully not my last ever. That, dear residents, is up to you.
What I do know is that 2025 has been an important year for Cape Town. It has been the most demanding year of this term, the most complex, and in many ways the most rewarding. It’s also the year in which a lot of long-term work finally became visible – not just in council documents or budget tables, but on the ground, in neighbourhoods, and in people’s daily lives.
Before I discuss the year that was, it’s important to again recall why we’re doing all of this.
In a country beset by government mediocrity, we are trying to buck the trend. We’re trying to demonstrate a model of success in South Africa, based on the pursuit of true excellence in the public service, and genuine care for every resident. We do so because we obviously care deeply about Cape Town and want this city to be a place of growing and wider prosperity for all.
But we are first and foremost passionate South Africans, and want to show here how our country can also achieve success in future.
We encapsulate this all in the idea of building a City of Hope for all.
Now, we are certainly not there yet. No honest mayor would pretend otherwise. But I can say with confidence that 2025 has been a year in which we took more meaningful steps towards that goal.
I was reminded recently of a great quote from Atomic Habits (a must read, if you haven’t yet), that “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
(Hat tip to Piet Viljoen, who writes a great weekly newsletter on the economy and markets, who reminded me recently of this quote. You can subscribe to his newsletter here.)
Having been in this job for four years now, I see the truth of this so clearly and powerfully.
You can spend a lot of time fixing a thousand individual problems (and I do, probably too often, as my long-suffering City colleagues who receive my messages and calls at unreasonable hours will attest). But unless you are also spending time investing in fixing the underlying systems, you really are just treating symptoms not causes.
This year, we continued to invest in better systems that will result in a better city.
Our city’s infrastructure network is the biggest and most important of these systems, essential to the success or failure of every city in the world. In recent years, we have significantly raised our levels of infrastructure investment, to the point where we can begin to see a time in future where our infrastructure is appropriate for a city of 5 million people, and growing rapidly.
That is still some way off, but undoubtedly our sustained higher levels of infrastructure investment is starting to bear fruit. All of the indicator data we track (number of sewer overspills, number of pipe bursts, fresh water treatment capacity, wastewater treatment capacity, and much more besides) are moving encouragingly in the right direction.
This year, the figure we invested in infrastructure reached R9.7 billion – just shy of the R10 billion mark we aimed for. We are confident we’ll break through that milestone next year. To put that into perspective, Cape Town’s infrastructure investment is far bigger than that of any other city in South Africa. In fact, over this term to date, we’ve outspent Johannesburg and Tshwane combined – R25 billion versus R22 billion – and we remain on track to outspend all three Gauteng metros by the end of this financial year.
That’s not about bragging rights. It’s about recognising what it actually takes to build a city that works. We’ve achieved this record investment by carefully – sometimes with difficulty – balancing three competing realities: the needs of a growing economy, the urgent demand for dignified services in the city’s poorest and fastest-growing areas, and the very real financial pressure felt by households and businesses who ultimately foot the bill. There’s nothing theoretical about that balancing act. It shows up in every council meeting, every public engagement, and every budget decision.
After infrastructure, the most important system improvement we made this year was in housing policy. I have no doubt that the new planning legislation we passed in Cape Town this year to enable micro-developers to build more affordable accommodation, faster, will make the biggest difference over time in getting people out of informal shacks and into brick-and-mortar housing.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the only workable plan to reduce informal settlements in South Africa. It will take time, of course, but it is a true example of the state doing what it should: laying out the enabling framework for investment and problem-solving to take place, rather than trying to do it all itself.
Housing remains one of the most emotionally charged and complex issues we face, because it sits at the intersection of dignity, inequality and our spatially divided history.
Besides the game-changing legislative amendments I’ve described above, we’ve continued this year to release as many of our own land parcels as we can (many of which sit as fallow assets), at discounted prices, to stimulate affordable housing delivery. This year, we reached 12 000 affordable housing units at various stages in this land release pipeline. And we’ve now released more land for affordable housing in the past three years than in the ten years before that.
Still, housing demand in Cape Town continues to outstrip supply, both public and private, and so the price of housing continues to rise. Most of this high demand comes from fellow South Africans “semigrating” here in record numbers. It is a measure of the relative success of our city that our countrymen are voting with their feet, upping sticks, and moving to Cape Town.
It is also no insignificant thing that the largest assets that most families will ever own, namely their homes, are growing in value more strongly here in Cape Town than in any other part of the country. This is often described as some evidence of failure, which I always find curious. It is quite the opposite. We take pride in growing middle class wealth. If only more of the South African state cared about doing the same!
Still, success also brings its own pressures. I have written elsewhere that the oft-touted solution of economic populists everywhere, price control, is a recipe for failure. You cannot price control your way out of high prices, you can only build your way out.
I was also struck again this year by how important making good hiring decisions is to fixing systems.
Those who have followed more closely what I’ve written about previously, will recall that I’ve expressed great frustration about the level of cleanliness in our city’s informal settlements. It’s important to me that everyone lives in a condition of reasonable cleanliness and dignity. This should be important to all of us.
Yet, despite much effort, we’ve struggled to crack this problem. We continue to spend considerable sums of public money and achieve generally below the outcomes we want.
After probing in the dark with a number of unsuccessful attempts, it was a crucial new hire earlier this year that has changed the game. Jason McNeil joined us from running the country’s largest listed waste management company, to run the City of Cape Town’s Urban Waste Management department.
As he has often reminded me since, this single City directorate is bigger and decidedly more complex than the business he previously ran. But he has brought a strategic and analytical clarity to the problem of managing waste in informal contexts, that gives me great confidence we will crack this problem. We will achieve better public outcomes for residents in informal settlements, in cleanliness, and in other basic services too.
Of course, the financial sustainability of those services was much in discussion in 2025.
South Africa’s big cities all face the same central financial conundrum. Ours is a rapidly urbanising country, with more and more people leaving the near-total government collapse in rural areas, and seeking a better life in the city. That means cities must deliver the basic services required for basic dignified living, and must do so on a heavily-subsidised or fully-subsidised basis. With a paucity of national economic growth, that means these cities must do so on a resource pool that isn’t growing, or isn’t growing at the same pace as the cost of basic services.
Add to this the essential and expensive work of investing in bulk infrastructure, and you can see the nub of the problem.
We had a difficult, but necessary, public debate about the City’s budget this year, particularly with residents in higher value properties.
Budgets are not glamorous. They don’t “trend”. No one reads them. But they are where values become real. This year we passed some crucial reforms to how the City breaks down and charges for services – reforms that were necessary to set up the city for a workable future. Every resident benefits when the City is able to fund essential infrastructure investment, and when more people have access to dignified basic services. Cape Town works best when it works for everyone.
But these discussions and changes were not easy. They sparked real debate, and in some cases real anxiety. I understand that, and we did our very best to make sure as many people who genuinely needed relief were able to get it. That includes extending rates relief to more middle-class homes and pensioners, with SA’s widest qualifying criteria for social assistance.
Achieving that balance – between sustainability, fairness and compassion – is not a simple task. But it is essential if we are serious about building a city of hope, rather than one that just shifts problems down the line.
Another defining feature of 2025 has been the extent to which the City has had to step into gaps left by national government, in areas where, frankly, we shouldn’t have to, but cannot afford not to.
The work we are doing to diversify our energy supply away from Eskom, and to see the devolution of the passenger rail network, continues. But it is in policing that this work of stepping in has remained most urgent.
Safety remains the number one concern for most Cape Town families, and rightly so. While SAPS struggles with resources, leadership and morale, this year saw the City making a major investment decision to deploy a massive 800 new Metro Police Officers to the streets. This is the largest one-year deployment in the Metro Police since its founding. Perhaps even more importantly, we continue to press hard for the real system fix: the investigative powers we need to make a real dent in gang, gun and drug crime convictions.
Our relentless advocacy on these issues, our advanced work in preparing our own plans and regulations, and our ongoing engagement with our colleagues in national government to make these reforms happen were a defining feature of 2025.
What has also been especially encouraging this year is seeing so many of our long-term projects reach visible milestones. Big city projects take time. They require planning, patience, and often a tolerance for disruption before benefits are felt. In 2025, a lot of that work started to show.
Take the MyCiTi bus service. The expansion of this system to Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha is the biggest public transport project currently underway in South Africa. It will bring what is widely regarded as the country’s best bus service to hundreds of thousands more Capetonians – effectively shrinking the city, connecting people to jobs, education and opportunity, and unlocking economic potential along the entire route.
Managing a contiguous construction site of more than 40 kilometres, through some of Cape Town’s toughest communities, with all of the complexity of relocating homes, dealing with construction mafias, placating furious traffic-delayed residents, while trying to stay on budget and on time, is no mean feat. My sincere thanks go to the exceptional team of engineers and project managers overseeing this project.
Water and sanitation is another area where the scale of investment can be hard to grasp, until you see the results. Cape Town is out-investing every other city in South Africa in this vital infrastructure.
Multi-billion-rand upgrades at wastewater treatment works like Potsdam, Macassar and Bellville progressed well in 2025. The Zandvlei upgrade was completed, improving services for the entire Khayelitsha area. Our bulk sewer upgrades – including the biggest ever undertaken on the Cape Flats – and our quadrupled pipe replacement programme are breaking records, quietly preventing failures that most people only notice when things go wrong.
On the energy front, we switched on our first landfill gas-to-power plant, a first for a municipality in South Africa. This plant is now supplying power to around 4 000 households, with more to come. We’ve continued to pioneer energy trading, closing in on one million kilowatt-hours wheeled between traders. Our R4 billion investment in grid upgrades over three years is laying the foundation for a decentralised, resilient energy future. And we pushed back in court – successfully – against Nersa’s regulatory chaos, securing a court-ordered timetable to force rational decisions on electricity tariffs.
Our Safe Space shelters – repeatedly endorsed this year by the courts – continued to play a critical role, not only in helping people off the streets, but in restoring public places so they can be used and enjoyed by all Capetonians. This work is not always popular. It is often misunderstood. But it is essential if we want a city that is both compassionate and functional, welcoming and fair.
Jobs, ultimately, remain the biggest source of dignity and hope. In 2025, Cape Town retained its position as South Africa’s employment capital, with by far the lowest unemployment rate in the country. Employment reached record levels of around 1.8 million people, and over 400 000 jobs have been added since the start of this term. Those are not abstract numbers. They represent households with income, children with food on the table, and futures that feel a little more secure.
And finally, one of the quieter but more moving highlights of the year was the awarding of Civic Honours to a selection of remarkable Capetonians at a special council meeting in November. Four Capetonians were recorded in the Civic Honours Book, and a further 18 received Mayor’s Medals for their outstanding contributions to Cape Town’s civic and cultural life. It really was inspiring to spend the morning with these men and women, and to thank them for making our city a better place.
In January, we will also award the Freedom of the City to two of Cape Town’s most beloved sons – David Kramer and the late Taliep Petersen – honouring their immense contribution to Cape Town’s cultural soul. These moments matter. They tell us who we are, and what we value.
As we wind down towards Christmas and New Year, I want to wish every Capetonian a safe and restful break. To those who celebrate it, as my own family does, I wish you a blessed and joyful Christmas. To everyone, I hope this time brings rest, connection, and a chance to recharge.
Thank you for walking this road with us – sometimes patiently, sometimes critically, always passionately. Building a city of hope is not quick work. But in 2025, we moved it forward in ways that will shape Cape Town for decades to come.
I look forward to continuing the journey with you in the year ahead.
Geordin Hill-Lewis
December 2025
Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office
